Word: chartered
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Burma's generals, meanwhile, have unveiled their impression of political reform, dubbing it "discipline-flourishing democracy." On Sept. 3, the regime announced it had finally agreed to basic guidelines for a new constitution. But no timetable for elections has been set, and the draft charter seems specifically designed to keep out Suu Kyi, long seen as the only leadership alternative to the junta. "It's a sham process that only legalizes the military's grip on power," says exiled dissident Khin Omar...
Paul Vallas, the man who took over the troubled school systems of Chicago and then Philadelphia and upended them, stood before a crowd of New Orleans parents in a French Quarter courtyard earlier this summer and offered a promise. "This will be the greatest opportunity for educational entrepreneurs, charter schools, competition and parental choice in America," he said. Call it the silver lining: Hurricane Katrina washed away what was one of the nation's worst school systems and opened the path for energetic reformers who want to make New Orleans a laboratory of new ideas for urban schools...
Vallas is part of that surge. He was persuaded to leave Philadelphia and take over the New Orleans' Recovery School District by the state's new reform-minded superintendent of education, Paul Pastorek, and by Senator Mary Landrieu, long a proponent of choice and charter schools. They want to give leaders their own schools, give the parents a choice and let the state funding follow the pupils to whatever schools the parents choose. It's a voucher system in all but name that blows up the monopoly of a traditional school district. In the process, they have attracted the best...
...system: one for the poor and one for the well-off. That's why I joined the board of Teach for America, which recruits top college graduates to spend two or three years teaching in poor districts, and why I became a supporter of more competition and choice and charter schools in the public education system. So I was eager to see whether the clean slate offered by post-Katrina New Orleans could be used to create a system better than the one we had before. This time, instead of examining the process as a journalist, I had both...
...decided that they needed a "harbor master" in New Orleans, someone who could coordinate the various organizations, funders and school operators. So one of the group, Matt Candler, was recruited to become Sarah's chief executive officer at New Schools for New Orleans. Matt had a great job helping charter-school operators in New York City, and he and his wife had just had their first child, so I thought it would be a hard sell. But when we talked, I realized that he was not only willing but also eager to move down. New Orleans was already becoming...